After showcasing his high placement on the Diablo 4 leaderboards last year, the world’s wealthiest man has moved on to greener pastures and is flexing his skills in arguably the best ARPG of all time, Path of Exile 2. However, recent streams cast doubt on his prowess and high-level hardcore ladder placements.
As first reported by PC Gamer on Jan. 10, Elon Musk has previously shown himself playing what is supposedly one of his hardcore characters in PoE 2, standing at level 95 as of Jan. 7. For the uninitiated, hardcore mode in PoE 2 and other ARPGs is one containing permadeath—if your character dies, they die for good. Getting far with a hardcore character is an impressive feat of its own, but having one at level 95 requires such immense skill that only the rare few succeed.
As PC Gamer illustrates, this high a level would let America’s richest businessman and soon-to-be government official take a few prestigious seats on the hardcore leaderboards, among the very best of the best PoE 2 players. However, as recent analyses from well-known PoE 2 streamers and other players in the community show, Musk might not be that good a player after all, with his character and success placed under a thick, dark veil of doubt.
A Jan. 8 Reddit post documented Musk’s entire journey through PoE 2‘s hardcore game mode. Allegedly, the entrepreneur has two hardcore characters within the top 60 as of Jan 8., placed at numbers 59 and 21, respectively. He also had numerous other hardcore characters who died throughout this gameplay journey, which is to be expected. However, in his stream, Musk failed to display any of the most basic skills imaginable that you simply must know by heart on top of every nook and cranny of the game to be able to perform with a level 95 hardcore character.
As the post indicates, Musk ran out of mana and seemingly didn’t know how to refill his flask after more than 10 seconds of playing with it empty, severely reducing his damage output. At another point, he apparently had no clue how to run maps, trying (and failing) to click numerous unconnected nodes. Mind you, he would have had to run hundreds if not thousands of maps, all progressively more difficult, to be able to reach that point, as the post clearly shows.
Musk also was incredibly slow on the looting side of things, picking up items by dragging them from the ground into his inventory (a method so inefficient it actually hurts, especially considering his real-life trade). At one point, he seemed to fail to understand why the item he was vehemently clicking on wouldn’t go into his inventory, despite his inventory being clearly full. He also entered new maps with a full inventory on several occasions and often ignored rare and valuable loot such as various currencies lying on the floor.
But perhaps one of the most damning pieces of evidence of foul play appears very early into the stream. At one point while going over his stashes, one of the tabs is called “Elon’s map.” As the post’s compiler rightfully asks: “If it was a one-player only account wouldn’t it just be ‘maps’?” No other tab carried the Elon name, implying that a third party managed and leveled the character in preparation for Musk’s show-off stream, though this is still inconclusive and will remain so until further evidence emerges. The post also mentions rumors of some of Musk’s characters’ stash tabs carrying Chinese names (implying Chinese farmers worked with them), but this, too, lacks substantial evidence.
All of the above, and a lot more, have caused a large portion of the PoE 2 community to bring Musk’s performance into question. While the Diablo 4 shenanigans went by without a hitch, it appears Musk’s attempts at swagger won’t fly with the ultimately more hardcore PoE 2 player base.
Published: Jan 10, 2025 01:39 pm